Workflow in Healthcare Discussion with Charles Webster MD

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Originally posted on OnPage Blog…

“Without workflow in healthcare, data is just a bottleneck!”

In the weeks leading up to HIMSS I have been trying to get a pulse on the themes that will be driving the conversation at the Conference. One of the themes I have heard discussed at length is the concept of improving workflow in healthcare. Workflow extends itself to many aspects of medicine. However, the facet that interested me most is why healthcare has started to focus on this theme that has been prevalent in many other fields for decades?

Indeed, workflow has also been a topic that we have discussed at several points in our own discussion of healthcare and IT topics. Given this overlap between the workflow conversation at HIMSS17 and writings on our blog, I decided to reach out to Dr. Charles Webster who is one of the HIMSS17 Social Media Ambassadors.

Charles is a bit of a Renaissance man with degrees in accountancy, computational linguistics, industrial engineering, artificial intelligence and medicine. He calls himself Dr. Workflow. He writes his blog at wareflo.com and lectures and teaches on improving workflows in healthcare.

The excerpts below represent a summary of our conversation.

Q: How did you get interested in the field of workflow?

I started off studying pre-med and accounting when I went to college. So, I got degrees in accountancy. I also got degrees in industrial engineering, artificial intelligence and medicine. if you look at the intersection of all this, it’s health IT and clinical decision support and workflow. I guess that makes me Dr. Workflow.

Q: Was it immediately apparent to you when you studied medicine that the field needed an improvement in workflow?

Yes.

But, I didn’t set out to be a workflow expert. When I was going for a PhD in Health Systems Engineering, my advisor who had a PhD in applied math and did studies on improving healthcare, bemoaned that none of the doctors she worked with took her seriously. She recommended that I get an MD. So, I went to the University of Chicago Medical School. While in medical school, I got to see the workflows of the various fields: dermatology, psychiatry, etc. And after medical school, I worked at a hospital for a few years in MIS and then for an EHR vendor where I worked in general medicine. So I got a very good view of how medicine flows and its needs for improvement.

I think my background in industrial engineering is what glued it all together. With that background, I was able to effectively analyze the inefficiencies in medicine.

Almost 6-7 yrs ago, I saw the workflow industry and healthcare IT industry increasingly overlap and I saw the opportunity to bring to healthcare what I had done for one EHR (electronic health record) client. At HIMSS and in all my social media and blogs. I am trying to emphasize the importance of workflow in healthcare.

Q: How much are doctors thinking about workflow?

Like medicine, workflow also has its Triple Aims:

  1. Educate healthcare about workflow. Tools do not equal workflow; they just help achieve workflow.
  2. Find success stories in workflow.
  3. Bring individuals from outside of health IT into health IT with interesting ideas and products about workflow. These are the individuals who are helping doctors think about workflow.

Everywhere I go at healthcare conferences, everyone in the halls is talking about workflow. They ask ‘how are you doing your workflow’?

Now, when I look at websites of companies attending HIMSS, they are all talking about workflow. Doctors are thinking about workflow. It has just taken a while.

Q: How do you see the impact of workflow in healthcare?

In 2011, there was virtually no mention of workflow in HIMSS exhibitor websites. Now 1/3 to 1/2 of websites mention workflow integration. The growth of EHR accounts for much of the growth in workflow technology and discussion from 2011 to today. In 2011, the rush towards EHR started but without a workflow to manage the barrage of data, healthcare hit the wall. The only way to go forward was to embrace a paradigm shift which focuses on workflow.

Data is fighting the workflow war. Health IT is 50% data + 50% workflow. Data isn’t a panacea. It needs workflow.

Q: Why is healthcare behind IT in adoption of workflow technologies?

Health IT is about ½ generation behind other IT verticals. This is because health IT has been so large for so long and reimbursed in cost plus fashion. There was no competitive pressure. Health IT presented such a large economy and it didn’t have much contact with the rest of IT. As such, it had little competitive pressure to influence it.

Q: Outside of healthcare, where else do you see workflow’s importance?

Indeed we see workflow tech showing up everywhere. It’s in DevOps. It’s in SecOps.

Devops is all about using orchestration technology to model processes such as deployment to cloud. SecOps is all about applying orchestration technology to cybersecurity – before, during, and after security incidents – for example, when an incident happens, we can push out patches, take off permissions and use post-mortems

DevOps and SecOps demonstrate an evolution of architectures. They are taking workflow out of individual applications and sharing it among applications.

Conclusion

We will continue to bring you other interviews from thought leaders at HIMSS in the days leading up to the HIMSS Conference. Sign up to meet with us at HIMSS.

To learn more about OnPage’s workflow integrations and technology, contact us or visit us at HIMSS17 at booth 343.

You can tweet to Charles at @wareFLO or visit him at booth 7785, the very first HIMSS conference makerspace, during HIMSS17.

CES 2020 in SocialVR: VR/AR/XR, Healthcare, AI, Robots, Drones, Sustainability & Climate!

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Please join us in social virtual reality via @AltspaceVR to discuss CES 2020 in SocialVR: VR/AR/XR, Healthcare, AI, Robots, Drones, Sustainability & Climate! Here is the reading list!

Guide to CES

Digital Health Summit

AR/VR/XR Everywhere: Live Events, Arcades and Theme Parks

Moving Care Beyond the Clinic

Digital Wellness for the Family

Firing on All Sensors

Successful Clinician and Technology Partnerships

AI and VR in Travel

Products for Digital Health in Smart Cities

The Travel Experience of the Future

Robots Saving the Oceans

Advancements in Precision Medicine; Diversity Impacts Innovation

Independent Living and Wellness: Smart Home Tech

Improving Humans’ Lives (Robots for Good)

Disruptive Tech for Disrupting Climate Change

FUTURE: In-Home Sleep Clinics and Heart-Health Advancements

Smart Health Just Got Smarter

Robots Saving Lives

The Next Horizon: Passive Remote Monitoring Transcends

Healthcare Value Chain in Medical Device Consumerization

Extraordinary Looks: VR Tackles Addiction & Virtual Anatomies

Akili: Challenging the Status Quo of Medicine

AI: The Holy Grail to Better Health?

Consumerized Healthcare Evolution + Digital Therapeutics’ Momentum

Behavioral Modification (Medical/Wearable

Tech and Touch: Growing Healthcare at Home

Health consumer 2040: Worlds apart from today

Unrealized Opportunities for STEM and STEAM

Social Virtual Reality: Health, Healthcare, and Health IT!

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10 years ago I wrote a blog post (#HIMSS10 Best Ever: Due in Large Part to Social Media) about how Twitter rescued HIMSS conferences for me. I’d been attending the premier health IT conference for over a decade but it had gotten so large and sprawling I no longer enjoyed it. I longed for its early small-town atmosphere, full of familiar faces. But then Twitter recreated that atmosphere via online tweetchats and at real-life meetups.

I still love, and am highly active on, Twitter, but I’ve discovered a new form of social media, one highly complementary to Twitter: social virtual reality! Social VR is any shared VR experience. I regularly share immersive, three-dimensional environments with people from across the globe. Starting during HIMSS18 I began hosting Health Systems Chat in Social VR events on the @AltspaceVR social VR platform. Only six showed up during HIMSS18, but they stuck around for six hours of conversation. And over 100 registered for social VR meetups during HIMSS19.

What is the most wonderful thing about attending a conference? Education, OK. Exhibitors, sure! But the secret sauce of great IRL conferences is networking. Standing next to someone, striking up conversation, and then… who knows? Social VR is perfect for this, at much less cost, to attendees, to (potentially) exhibitors, and, most definitely, to the planet. Air travel is a major contributor to atmospheric carbon and climate change.

What’s the difference between a social VR meetup and a tweetchat? (Which I feel I must emphasize I still love!) Social virtual reality is phenomenologically a completely different subjective experience than posting, reading, and replying to traditional social media activity streams such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and similar. Social VR leverages immersion (of your senses within a 3D environment, from a simple conference room to standing on the surface of Mars), presence (feeling as if actually physically present together in that virtual 3D space), and embodiment (you feel as if your avatar is actually, physically you) leading to conversation more accurately imitating real-life, face-to-face, social interaction. It is a high-bandwidth, dynamically co-produced, oral, postural, and gestural “dance.”

I could go on-and-on but I’ll describe one illuminating example. Last year, on a dare to myself, I spent nine hours in social VR hosting an event in parallel with the WTFix conference. Over nine hours, attendance fluctuated between 30 users and exactly one, but never zero! There was always at least one other person who, touchingly, stayed to keep me company! I’d say, please, you don’t have to stay. They’d say, no, no, no… no problem. One time we completely ran out of smalltalk, and we stood next to each other, comfortably and companionably for almost 30 minutes. Then they exclaimed, there’s someone! Five minutes later while I chatted with half a dozen new participants, I looked around to see my good friend had quietly excused themselves.

For almost 30 minutes we stood in silent solidarity together. I cannot think of any similar experience on traditional social media. But I can think of many similar experiences in real life. Even though social VR represents a progression and evolution of social media, to be perfectly honest, I don’t even think of it as social media at all. It’s too similar to hanging out with my backyard buddies during elementary school, dormitory roommates and neighbors in college, and after-work cubicle colleagues from our hospital MIS department. Oh, and #HITsm meetups at HIMSS conferences!

I believe social VR will not just augment, but will eventually replace many current IRL conference experiences, from education to exhibition to professional networking. All while saving money, time and the planet.

If you are intrigued by social VR, try a couple of fun activities. Create your VR avatar with this iOS or Android app and post a screenshot during our #HITsm tweetchat. Let’s see who can get closest to what we really look like! (I’ll also post links to this app at the beginning of our #HITsm tweetchat.) Check out the video in the tweet below, of the 3D world I created, and then enter the world and practice your browser navigation and controls.

If you can walk and chew gum at the same time, during our #HITsm tweetchat, open two browsers, one for Twitter, the other for the Hubs social VR platform. Here is a cheat sheet for browser mouse and keyboard controls. Or borrow your child’s VR headset (you know, the one into which they slide their smartphone). Please use earphones to eliminate extremely irritating audio feedback! Note, while social VR in a browser is fun, it does not do justice to the psychological impact of experiencing it in a VR headset.

Given the title of this Tweetchat I could have spent this entire post listing potential uses for social virtual reality in health, healthcare, health IT, and health IT marketing. For example, see my blog posts: Healthcare Virtual Reality: The Social App. and Virtual Reality-based Healthcare & IT Marketing) Instead, here, I’ll ask YOU…

T1 In your opinion what are some potential uses for social virtual reality in health, healthcare, health IT, and HIT marketing? Use your imagination and be creative! #HITsm

T2 If you could create or recreate any beloved indoor or outdoor 3D space (prosaic or fantastical) to share with fellow #HITsm ‘ers to hang out together in, please describe it!

T3 How realistic do you feel our social VR avatars should be? From cartoon-y stick-figure animations to real-time photorealistic holograms. Does it even matter? #HITsm

T4 If your social VR avatar could be any character from history, fiction, fantasy, science fiction, or the movies, who would you become? #HITsm

T5 How can you see tradition activity stream-based social media and social VR fitting together? Do they necessarily compete? Might they be combined to benefit each other? #HITsm

Bonus (In case you’ve not done so yet) Let’s see screenshots of your 3D avatars using the iOS and Android apps downloaded from links provided at the beginning of this #HITsm tweetchat!

Virtual Reality-based Healthcare & IT Marketing

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This is me. The little robot. I am looking out of its eyes and it feels exactly as if I am teetering on the edge of a wooden platform 1000 feet above Boston. The Charles River is off to my left.

chuck-wareflo-socialvr

I’m a boring looking robot. I haven’t customized my avatar yet. But I wanted to show you what you’ll look like when you are first “spawned.” That hand up in the air? I’m holding my Oculus Go controller up to make that happen. If I click its trigger, the fingers wave hello. In fact, that’s how folks in social VR often greet each other, with a friendly wave of the hand. Just like real-life. Also, see my head slightly tilted to my right? Our heads move all the time, nodding, gazing, looking up and to the left (or is it the right) when we’re trying to remember something. Again, just like real-life.

Later, I’ll tell you where the stuff around me and behind me (the VR “content”) came from and how I put it together. And I’m sure to mention again the over forty Health Systems Chat in Social VR events I’ve hosted. But first, let’s talk about virtual reality and marketing, including content marketing.

Consider this milestone. Augmented World Expo, the “biggest conference and expo for people involved in Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Wearable Technology,” is celebrating its 10th annual anniversary, and adding it’s first-ever marketing and sales track.

Virtual reality is a form of content. Traditionally, marketing content has been the written word. Ten years ago I started a blog (wareflo.com) about healthcare workflow and workflow technology. It now has almost a third of a million words. I’ve written lots of white papers for vendors (sometimes anonymously). But there are as many kinds of content as there are forms of media, such as images, video, and interactive multimedia. Webinars (which I’ve also given a lot) are another form of popular content in healthcare and IT marketing.

Virtual reality is also content, albeit a special and relatively new form of content, for marketers to understand and leverage. Consider this diagram from A History of Content Management Systems:

Also consider this, from How to Get the Most out of Your Content Tech Stack (and note one my other obsessions, business process management, I’ll explore the VR/workflow connection in a future post)

 

A bit further below, I’ve appended some great articles on virtual reality and marketing. Here are some phrases from those articles.

  • Engagement
  • Forward-thinking
  • Don’t just create content, create experience
  • Walkthroughs
  • Emotional journeys
  • Sensory impact
  • Story living, not storytelling
  • 100% of attention
  • Flexibility (from 360 photos & videos to game engine-driven interactions)
  • Transportive (example: my social VR event aboard the International Space Station)

I hope you can see some opportunities for healthcare and IT marketing in those phrases!

Believe it or not, the VR headset turned 50 years old last year. VR, like other now popular trends in healthcare and health IT, such as artificial intelligence, has had multiple booms and busts. Time will tell whether this is VR’s AI-like moment. But consider these facts (from What is a VR marketing?):

  • VR industry to hit $33.90 billion by 2022
  • Sold VR headsets to reach 82 million by 2020
  • VR users last year: 171 million (up from 200K in 2014)
  • 62% consumers feel more engaged with brands sponsoring VR experiences
  • 71% consumers perceive brands using VR as “forward-thinking”

Are healthcare and IT consumers and prosumers more or less representative of these numbers? My gut tells me, prosumers yes, perhaps even a bit ahead of the curve, but consumers, no, but not far behind, and perhaps, about to catch up in a big way. Many VR enthusiasts feel that healthcare is the biggest opportunity for VR applications.

Anyway, check out these excellent articles about VR and marketing. They aren’t healthcare or IT specific, but I’m sure what you’ll see many of the same themes of the upcoming Healthcare & Health IT Marketing Conference.

The following are not about VR and marketing per se, but seemed relevant to me:

Now, about that little robot and the VR content around it…

I used a simple-to-operate VR content editor called Spoke to create a Mozilla Hubs social VR event space. I usually use the AltspaceVR platform, relying on their WYSIWYG “World Editor.” I prefer AltspaceVR because it is a more fully-featured social media platform. I am friends (in the Facebook and Twitter follower sense) with hundreds of other social VR lovers. When I go “in-world” I can see who is home or online, and they can see the same about me. We often stop in to see what each other is up to, which often is creating VR content. Often this is about customizing their worlds to entertain themselves and their friends. If you love cats, you create Cat World, in which to celebrate cats, including animated 3D cats! I spend a lot of time creating worlds in which to hold my every-other-week Health Systems Chat in Social VR events. And folks keep popping in to see what I’m up to. Sometimes they’ve been to a previous HSC-SVR event. Sometimes they just happened to be online and see that I’m online too.

Mozilla Hubs has almost none of the above. You can’t friend people. You can’t see who’s online. You can’t schedule future events. But Mozilla Hubs does several things that AltspaceVR does not do (yet). It works with inexpensive Google Cardboard headsets (as inexpensive as the dozens of 99 cent folding VR goggles I gave away last year). And it works in a non-VR web browser mode (Chrome or Firefox). I’ve occasionally spun up a social VR event space during tweetchats and invited folks to participate, in order to give them a taste of social VR. Some of those folks have gone on to join AltspaceVR for the more fullsome social VR experience.

For the purposes of this blog post, what Hubs and AltspaceVR have in common is VR content creating and sharing it with others in real-time. If you’ll refer back to the photo of me, the robot, around the periphery you’ll notice what is called a “skybox.” This is 360 spherical aerial photo I found of Boston. I am teetering on the edge of what appears to be a wooden floor. I found this floor on the popular 3D object-sharing website called SketchFab. Behind me is a hot air balloon that I also found. To my right and behind me are some images (workflow, 3D-printing, and social VR themed) I uploaded and positioned on the periphery of the platform. I then clicked “Publish,” waited a few moments, and was returned a link, which, if clicked in Chrome or Firefox, takes me into the shareable VR event space. If I have a VR headset, it seems like I am standing there, looking around, down at Boston, up at the hot air balloon. If I send the link to someone or tweet it out and someone joins me, they appear as a robot avatar, toward who I can move and speak.  Robots appear in random colors so you can distinguish participants. Whatever name they have chosen for themselves appears floating over their heads. In this case, my name is Chuck-wareFLO-socialVR.

What is it like in social VR? Sometimes a bit chaotic! Just like in real-life. Sometimes everyone speaks at once, and you have to organically self-organize and allow everyone their turn. Just like in real-life. And sometimes weird but fun stuff happens, such as in this short video from a recent HSC-SVR event. You can hear the chaos and self-organization, and then you can see me (blue shirt) fly off to the Sun to take a selfie of everyone beneath me.

I hope you’ll join me in social virtual reality sometime! It’s fun. I’ll introduce you to a bunch of new people. And it just might become another arrow in your quiver of healthcare & IT marketing arrows!

See you at the Healthcare & IT Marketing Conference, online of course! Last year I live-streamed 360 video from the HITMC Awards ceremony. If you watch while wearing a VR headset, you feel as if you are actually present (albeit 9-feet tall standing and between the audience and the stage!).

P.S. Subscribe to Health Systems Chat to find out about all of the social virtual reality events hosted by Chuck Webster, MD, MS (AI), MS (Industrial Engineering), @wareFLO https://twitter.com/wareflo on Twitter. Let’s explore and discuss how our healthcare system is put together and works (or doesn’t!). Its workflows! And how VR can help! Patient? You’re the expert! Bring your personal story to improve healthcare for everyone!

Screenshot 2019-04-09 at 8.51.29 AM

Virtual Care Will Become Virtual Reality Care: Patient Engagement & Digital Twins

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Over the past two years, I’ve spent more and more time in social virtual reality. Social VR is, and isn’t, like more traditional social media, which is based on following activity streams of text, images, and video. It is similar in that it allows people to remotely socialize with each other. It is different in that Twitter (for example and which I love) is low bandwidth and asynchronous. Low bandwidth means you are only experiencing a tiny subset of potential human communication experience, albeit a highly informational and entertaining subset. Asynchronous means we are responding to posts that may have happened hours, or even years before.

In contrast, social VR is high bandwidth and synchronous. By high bandwidth, I mean the experience of interacting with others in social VR more closely approximates what it is like to communicate in real-life face-to-face circumstances. By synchronous, I mean that back-and-forth verbal and non-verbal communication occurs at the level of milliseconds, not hours, days, or years.

Given my broad analysis of major differences between social VR and other digitally facilitated communication, what, exactly, does social VR bring to the virtual care party?

The biggest potential impact of social virtual reality on healthcare is on patient engagement. The emotional impact of VR is such that it is even being used by social activists to build empathy for the wide variety of disadvantaged classes, poor, people of color, transgendered, immigrants, etc. This emotional impact comes from VR’s unique combination of immersion, embodiment, and presence. To use a computer analogy, I can engage in a tweet chat using a tiny fraction of my mental “CPU” attentional capacity, but when I’m in social VR, my CPU is pegged at 100% for the duration. I have been moved, feeling compassion and intimacy, in ways that emails, mobile apps, or even video conferencing have never even approached.

Have you ever had a dream in which you imagined you were dead or dying, in which you observed the consequences of your behavior and the sorrow of your family, and thought it was real and begged for a second chance? If you haven’t, you’ve missed a remarkable experience. If you have, you’ll know that the following was true; you were, at that moment just before waking up, fully engaged to the max. VR can be like this.

Experience.

Patient experience.

Patient engagement.

I won’t belabor the point. But you can surely see the potential for using VR to more fully “activate” patients.

Where I want to go to is much more prosaic. For example, imagine virtual patient-physician encounters via social VR… How is this possible? You may ask. Well, check out the tech featured in this tweet.

And what about those headlines about patients impatient with their physician because their good doctor spends more time staring at their computer screen than looking at their patient? Do you recall what Google Glass promised? A physician could potentially continuously gaze at a patient, while at the same time viewing patient-relevant data and what the physician says being incorporated into their medical record. Social VR offers exactly the same facility, while at the same time not requiring patient and physician to travel through space and rearrange schedules.

Now, let’s up our virtual healthcare reality game…

What if we had a “digital twin” of our entire healthcare system?

A digital twin is a computer model of a physical system, such as a jet engine or a bridge. Embedded sensors in the physical world feed data to parameters in the computer model. Viewing this continually updated computer model is a way to continually keep tabs on the physical system.

How does VR fit into digital twins? What are the potential applications in healthcare? And patient experience and healthcare workflow?

35 years ago I spent a year creating an executable computer model of patient flow through the student health center at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. If you take a moment to zoom in on the details — handwritten flowchart, mimeographed map & form, and pre-dot matrix line printer — primordial stuff!

For one week we gave every patient, both scheduled and walk-in, the blue form. We asked them to time-stamp it at various stations and to annotate the form as to who saw them, etc. I entered this data into a file and fed it to the computer model. We tried various ways to schedule staff and patients to best accommodate walk-ins.

Just think if we had all that data available, without bothering patients, all the time and in real-time, feeding data and machine learning pipelines to clean and aggregate and continuously update patient workflow digital twin parameters. Now, add means to view the model in virtual reality. Now add means to view in via augmented reality while actually in the hospital. Can you imagine the possibilities to both systematically improve workflow not just through systematic improvements in workflow design but monitoring and redirecting workflow in during its very execution?

Guess what, lots of health IT vendors focussing on patient flow and capacity management are already doing this (minus the VR and AR).

But I want to go a step further. Let’s use the digital model to actually deliver healthcare.

What if everything that does not require literally hands-on between clinical personnel and patients could be accomplished in virtual reality? You’ve heard of web-first or mobile-first? What about VR-first?

What if new healthcare workflows existed FIRST in VR?

Patients could not just tour the facilities before they are built (and presumably fewer would have to be built) but also experience and critique workflow, in effect, help co-design  workflow.

I’ll close with an observation. Most social VR events I participate are minimalistic, in the sense that if you compare what they look like in VR to what they look like in real-life, the latter, naturally, look far more real. But take a look at this tour of a “Realistic Scandinavian Home” on @AltspaceVR. It is, IMO, remarkably realistic, and this is via a $199 Oculus Go. How many trips to the doctor in VR could pay for this? Two? Three?

254 Miles Above SXSW, a Social Virtual Reality Meetup, March 11, Noon CT!

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Register for VR & Health Tech at #SXSW South by Southwest #SXSW2019!

And, could you, would you, RT the tweet below? Thank you so very much!

Should I Rebrand as “Dr. Workflow”?

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It happened over-and-over at the recent HIMSS19 conference. “Dr. Workflow!”, “I’d like to you meet Dr. Workflow!”, and even, “Dr. Workflow, I presume….” Apparently, my reputation precedes me!

It’s not like I haven’t seen the same on Twitter, for example…

and…

But it’s a bit different when it happens face-to-face.

I have a blog at wareflo.com, titled The Healthcare Business Process Management Blog. I started it about 10 years ago. It has over 700 posts, mostly about healthcare workflow and workflow technology. But for the past year, most of my online content creation energy has gone into an every-other-week blog post-like event landing page on the increasingly popular social virtual reality platform @AltspaceVR.

I clearly need a blog. I also think I need a brand-refresh. But I don’t want to change a bunch of stuff on the HC BPM Blog at wareflo.com So I decided to continue to maintain it as an archive. Even without any new content, it still gets a lot of hits a month.

So, it looks like DrWorkflow.WordPress.com is now my new flagship blog going forward.

 

Get Your Free 3D-Printed #ChampionsOfHealth Badge at the #HIMSS19 #HIMSSmakers Makerspace!

Image

 

For the 3rd year in a row, I’m bringing the #HIMSSmakers Makerspace to #HIMSS19! Come by booth 450 (on the main aisle, extreme end of the exhibit hall) to have fun making cool stuff. We’ll have a 3D-printer, Arduino microcontrollers, Raspberry Pi minicomputers, sensors, and servos. Have an idea of a product you’d like to prototype? Let’s get started!

Patients! You’re the expert! Design thinking plus real-life engineering platforms and tools to build your working, functioning prototype…

While you’re (t)here, get some cool 3D-printed swag: #ChampionOfHealth badges (Meet Our Champions of Health), #HIMSSshoes, #HIMSStiara s, and other #HIMSS19-themed 3D-printed tchotchkes. I made it all myself, on one of my 3D-printers. And, since I’m a HIMSS Social Media Ambassador (6th year in a row), resign yourself to a tweeted selfie holding or wearing your prize, with the #HIMSSmakers Makerspace behind us!

Thank you OneView Healthcare (booth 450, on the main aisle at the extreme end of the exhibit hall, next to eClinicalWorks) for making this year’s #HIMSSmakers Makerspace possible. screenshot 2019-01-26 at 2.02.11 pm

Read about past #HIMSSmakers Makerspaces and yours truly!

P.S. Below: #HIMSStiara, #HIMSSshoes, and Florida-shaped thingies, oh my!

Welcome to My Umpteenth Blog Website!

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I started blogging in the late ’90s. Mostly about medical informatics and cognitive science. Back then I basically just kept adding pages to a website by editing native HTML. Then I used a variety of webpage (Netscape)and website editors (NetObjects Fusion, FrontPage). I eventually tried Blogger, WordPress.com, and then self-hosted WordPress.org via GoDaddy.

I particularly liked being able to run PHP scripts to automate some of my content generation. I also enjoyed installing a zillion plugins. But I did not enjoy them breaking during updates. With more recent versions of WordPress.org, I no longer needed plugins. Everything I needed was natively available. However, occasionally GoDaddy upgraded something on the backend or deprecated something I counted on… Google’s recent “not secure” notice for websites not using SSL certificates was kinda the last straw.

So now I’m taking a look at WordPress.com again. And I’m seeing features missing back then that resulted in me going to a self-hosted approach. I’m not even sure I’m going to get (or transfer a domain). I used to think of my website domain as my online brand. I was charleswebster.com, chuckwebster.com, and the wareflo.com. Now, not so much. Our social media accounts seem to have taken over a lot of that online branding function. (I’m @wareFLO on Twitter, and I spend a fair bit of time in hosting social virtual reality events on the @AltspaceVR Health Systems Chat channel).

I also used to make sure my first blog post on a new platform was a grand prediction of all the things I hoped to accomplish with that new blog. For that purpose, I’ll just include my initial blog header description…

Engineer/MD, healthcare SW developer, workflow evangelist, 3D printing/makerspace fanatic, HIMSS Social Media Ambassador, host #HealthSystemsChat in #SocialVR! 

Thank you in advance!

P.S. Check out my other (maybe even eventually “previous”) blog website at wareflo.com! 10 years worth of almost a half million worlds about healthcare workflow and workflow technology.